


In Tiredness, Truth

by seashadows



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings (Movies), The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: First Time, M/M, Pelennor Fields, Post-Battle, non-graphic depictions of death and injury in the background
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-07-15 13:59:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7225177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seashadows/pseuds/seashadows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Were I Aragorn,” Gimli said, “I would not have released those shades just yet.” </p>
<p>Legolas yawned. “Then that is how we differ.” </p>
<p>Gimli and Legolas have stayed by each other's side through - and after - the Battle of Pelennor Fields, but now it's time to have a few conversations, some more important than others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Tiredness, Truth

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [2000GigolasFics](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/2000GigolasFics) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
> "It still only counts as one!"
> 
> After the battle in RotK, Gimli and Legolas have a playful argument, which turns into a rather frank discussion about size, and whether or not it matters.

“Were I Aragorn,” Gimli said, “I would not have released those shades just yet.” 

Legolas yawned. “Then that is how we differ.” 

The battlefield lay bare, save for the few corpses that neither kin, enemy, nor raven had picked off, and for the drying blood that stuck the long grasses together in dark clumps. Legolas could hardly bear to look at it; his eyes rolled towards the dark sky instead from the excellent vantage point of his head upon Gimli’s stomach. Both counted themselves among the lucky warriors who had sustained no severe wounds, and so they had been banished from the healing tents to lie about on their own. 

Legolas could think of no better place to lie down than head-on-belly with a friend. 

“They hadn’t outlived their usefulness yet,” Gimli countered. “That cursed Sauron isn’t defeated yet, is he? He’s a much bigger shade than they are. Were. Are we counting them as still…” He smacked his lips in thought. “Not alive. Thinking, maybe.” 

“A promise is a promise,” said Legolas. He shifted his head, and from Gimli’s chuckle, knew that his hair had tickled his friend’s round cheeks. Everything about Gimli’s solidity showed his strength, including even the good-natured shape of his face. Anyone who had just seen him in battle would know that he was as fierce as he was kind, and would have known already, had they taken the time to look at him closely. The Valar alone knew that Legolas had, in all this time they had spent together. 

Gimli would certainly laugh if he could see inside his head, and say he was gathering dust and cobwebs with all his time spent in thought. Legolas smiled and shifted again to hear Gimli’s laughter. 

He was rewarded with a snort. “Fiendish Elf! Who told you to wound me? This battle is over, you know.” 

Legolas pushed himself into a sitting position immediately, palms against the wet grass. “Are you hurt, Gimli? Where?” Thick Dwarvish clothing could hide numerous wounds, too many of those mortal. 

“Nowhere.” Gimli’s face creased into a smile so large that Legolas could see it even with only the moon and distant lamplight from the healing tents to illuminate it. “It’s a metaphor, laddie. Elves must think in it all the time. Isn’t that why you said the army of the dead must go?” He laughed and tilted his head back, affecting a high, breathy voice that sounded less like an Elf than like a goblin’s screech. “They’ve got to float across the Grey Havens and dissolve into the essence of life! They must communicate with the trees!” 

Legolas rolled his eyes and took back his former resting position, this time with his face buried in Gimli’s belly just beneath the lower line of his ribs. Gimli smelled of sweat, but it was no matter. He suspected that he himself smelled much the same. “There are trees here,” he said, “not only in Valinor. You’ve seen how mighty they can grow. The Lady of Lorien would be disappointed to hear you mock them, Gimli.” 

“Mighty trees,” said Gimli dismissively. His rumbling voice tickled Legolas’s face. “Mallorns are beautiful, but I wouldn’t call them mighty.” 

“Beauty can be might,” Legolas told him. “Were you not the one who spoke poetry when he saw the Lady Galadriel, or did I hit my head too hard in battle?” 

“You might have,” Gimli agreed. “My head is hard enough to take it.” He ran his fingers through Legolas’s hair, and at the warm touch, Legolas shivered. The night had grown cold. “Lady Galadriel is very beautiful, but I meant physical might. Do trees compare to a mountain?” 

Legolas had not yet seen the Lonely Mountain. The Valar, it seemed, had conspired to keep him away, and his father’s mouth stayed stubbornly closed on the subject of Erebor. “Many trees could rival it,” he said. “What about the Ents?” 

Gimli pulled lightly on his hair, not nearly enough to hurt. Legolas leaned into the playful touch. “It still only counts as one,” he said. “One tree to one mountain. We’ll see who’s mightier then, Elf. Size matters.” 

That was the wrong thing to say. As though someone had thrown a stone into a still pool, Legolas felt ripples of heat spread out from some point deep in his chest. Soon he would be as red as a ripe tomato, and it would be all Gimli’s fault. Well, his and Aragorn’s – he talked so often about his conversations with his former fellow Rangers regarding size below one’s leggings. Legolas had heard far too many accounts of various Mannish encounters for his comfort, and the assertion that size mattered featured in…well, too many to count. Too many by any definition. 

“The size of what, exactly?” he said. From far away, a faint scream reached his ears, and he startled to his feet. “Gimli? Who was that?” 

At once, Gimli stood, too. “Wait,” he said, and cupped a hand around his ear. The scream did not come again. “No one we know. That’s not Master Merry’s voice, reckless thing he is.” 

“Nor Lady Eowyn’s,” said Legolas. “And they’re not terribly hurt, if…” _If they don’t keep screaming_ , he meant to say, but couldn’t make the words come out. To speak of pain on a night when the possibility of death hung in the air – no, that wouldn’t portend anything good for his friends. “Gimli?” 

“Steady, lad.” Gimli took his hand and squeezed it hard. Although the top of his head ended where Legolas’s chest began, his hand outstripped Legolas’s in size. There was size again; Legolas bit the insides of his cheeks to try to keep a blush from appearing. “Should we rest more? Don’t think I didn’t see that yawn.” 

The thought of a former yawn made Legolas yawn again. Suddenly, Gimli’s beard-padded chest sounded like an appealing place to rest his head. “All right,” he said, “but you’d best explain what you mean about size mattering.” 

Gimli chuckled and didn’t speak again until they had lain down once more. “A mountain against a tree,” he said. “What could compare in size?” 

Legolas covered his mouth and laughed into his hand, although he wasn’t sure why. “Perhaps there’s another sort of size that matters,” he said, “and perhaps that’s what I thought you said.” 

“Ah.” Gimli caught Legolas’s eye over the soft mound of his beard. They glittered with an unreadable expression in the dark. “That sort o’size, then.” He snorted, and then laughed, too. “Have you ever used yours, then?” 

“Only for my own pleasure,” Legolas said, “never someone else’s.” Maybe the battle had loosened his tongue; it ran on now, just as Gimli’s father had once said that Dwarves’ tongues tended to do. Fighting might have put Dwarvish fire into his blood, or turned him part-Dwarf himself. Would he mind, if such a fanciful magic came to be? _No_ , he thought. “Have…have you?” 

Gimli sighed and wriggled to lay himself flatter. Legolas moved with him. “More than you, then,” he said. A note of merriment underlied his voice when he added, “Dwarves may love once, but we may take pleasure, too. Use whatever size we’ve got.” 

“What _is_ it that you have?” Legolas asked. He had been bold in battle; he could be bold here, in discussing matters of the bed. “Is it long, then? Have your bed-partners said that it matters?” 

Gimli’s laughter vibrated through Legolas’s entire body like living thunder. “Are you asking to see it?” 

Legolas swallowed deeply and shifted his head so that his view consisted entirely of the sky and stars. “Better than seeing that,” he said, and pointed by memory towards the remains of a _Mumakil’s_ body. “It’s been half-carried off. Yours hasn’t.” 

“The carrion could just as easily have taken mine,” said Gimli. His tone was jocular, though his words were morbid; still, Legolas did not want to hear them said. 

“I don’t know if I could have borne it,” he said quietly, “if anything had happened to you.” 

Gimli stilled for a moment. Then he began to stroke Legolas’s hair, his movements slow and comforting. “All that happened to me was that I won our wager,” he said. “Nothing will happen to me. Nor to you, if I’ve got anything to say about it. I couldn’t…” He cleared his throat hard. “You mean much the same to me.” 

Legolas closed his eyes and let his friend’s touch relax him. Slowly but surely, his heart calmed and his body lost the tension that he didn’t even know it had possessed until it was gone. “ _Could_ I see it, then?” 

He could nearly hear Gimli’s smile. “With what we mean to each other, y’ask that?” 

“If you’re insulted –“ 

“No, no.” Gimli moved to stand again, or so Legolas thought until he saw him sit up. “It’s fair enough. I’ve got some desire to see yours, too. If you’re not shy of it?” The sentence turned up a question at the end. 

“I’m not.” Legolas scrambled to sit across from Gimli and watched the Dwarf’s fingers, which moved quickly to undo his trousers. “Gimli?” 

“Aye?” 

Legolas looked down his own body and saw at once that he hadn’t just imagined the heaviness there; he had begun to rise. His face heated all over again, and suddenly his clothing felt far too heavy and hot, even for the cool night. “We could touch, couldn’t we? If we wished to.” 

Gimli’s fingers only stilled for a moment. “Aye, Legolas. We could.” 

Legolas looked towards the healing tents and satisfied himself that no one would come upon them, at least not before they had time to dress again, then undid his trousers and pulled them down as Gimli did the same. “You are much thicker than I am,” he said when he had had his fill. No, he would never have his fill – this new sight, he suspected, would entrance him for the rest of his life – but another minute without talking and he would burst. “Your hair is…abundant.” 

Gimli smiled. “That’s so, but you’re longer than I am,” he said, “and you’ve got some hair there yourself.” He pointed to Legolas’s arousal, and at once, the ridiculous thought flitted through Legolas’s head that Gimli was pointing at him two ways. Indeed, Gimli was hard, too. “You could have partners if y’wanted.” 

“Only one.” Legolas’s head swam as it had the night he and Gimli set a wager for their drinking. He had tried hard to hide it, but drunk he had been indeed. Now he was drunk again. If Gimli had made him so, then it was a strange Dwarven magic; he needed more. “Gimli?” 

Gimli swallowed, and his deep voice turned even rougher than usual when he spoke. “Aye.” 

“I’d like to kiss you if I could.” 

“You could.” Gimli reached across the space between them and put a hand on Legolas’s knee. “Anything you’d like.” 

Legolas scooted the short distance to Gimli on his knees and Gimli did the same. Were they not in this situation, he suspected he’d find the motion ridiculous, but here they were, and now their lips met. Legolas’s eyes closed at once, and greedily, he gloried in every sensation that Gimli’s body provided; he rubbed his cheeks against Gimli’s springy beard as their lips met and met again, his hands grasped the back of Gimli’s head to pull him closer, and when Gimli’s warm hand reached down and stroked them both together, he cried out into his mouth in Sindarin. 

He shivered deeply when it was over, after Gimli had satisfied them both and kissed Legolas so hard that he saw stars. “Come here, lad,” Gimli said, beckoning Legolas to lie down as they had before. “Do up your trousers and warm yourself with me.” 

Legolas obeyed, but this time, he didn’t merely rest his head on Gimli’s chest. He curled up next to Gimli and faced him nose to nose, slipping a hand around his waist. Gimli’s breath was warm on Legolas’s face and his hand, which he laid on Legolas’s hip, squeezed and stroked in a series of circles. “Did it matter?” Legolas whispered. “The size.” 

“You were more than my match,” Gimli replied. “In fact, I think you’ve satisfied me so well, there may never be any others.” 

The word, the number, went unspoken, yet Legolas didn’t have to ask what Gimli meant. “Nor for me,” he said. “I look forward to it.” 

Their lives could have been lost today, even his, as ephemeral as Gimli’s was in comparison. Their journey was not yet finished; he would have to cling to Gimli with all the strength he had, though they had both lost so much to weaken them. But side by side with a friend, or more, they _would_ go on. 

Together they watched the stars, and sleep mercifully allowed them plentiful waking contact before it claimed them.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Mumakil_ : Oliphaunt


End file.
